Follow the Crumbs

I would love to be a full time writer.

Unfortunately, I have bills to pay, growing teenagers to feed and a mortgage to keep my head above. And that all means I need a day job.

My day job, however, consumes a large portion of my creativity and imagination.

Some days, that is all-consuming. I am frequently spent when I sit in front of my manuscript at night.

Hence, it can often be days before I pick up a story thread from where I left off.

And, until recently, getting any momentum from a standing start was difficult.

Where did the time go?

I am time poor.

I think most people in my age group, financial situation and cultural background are these days.

Lack of time is a massive, massive barrier to my writing.

Once I've finished work and picked kids up from training and cooked dinner and spent time with my loved ones and knocked off the odd Duolingo lesson and carved out a little reading time, I have few precious minutes left in the wallet.

Old me used to just write late into the night and sleep less. Old me also tried doing the same thing at the other end of the day.

In both cases, long term lack of sleep became an issue -- it contributed to a decline in my mental health.

I tried an online course, which, through a series of tasks, encouraged me to cram writing into those spare moments and seconds one finds throughout the day.

That probably works great if you've got the sort of brain that can switch easily between tasks. Mine tends not to be so elastic these days.

If I'm in the office, I'm only thinking about work stuff. If I'm cooking, I'm focussed entirely on the food.

And even on the rare occasion I could flip the switch, I'd flounder around, wondering where the hell I was in the story.

Finding my way back into a story, is a problem I still have today. Even when I do find a solid 30 minutes to write, I take more than half that time discovering where the story's up to and where it's going.

That was until Mary Robinette Kowal introduced me to her style of breadcrumbing.

The right recipe

I adore Mary Robinette Kowal.

She is a long-time member of the Writing Excuses team, who teaches about the craft of writing and storytelling. And she writes some pretty, bloody good stories herself.

I love how much she gives back to the writing community.

I was recently watching one of her free writing classes, via her Patreon feed, called Barriers to Writing.

One of the barriers she raised, which spoke to me, was lack of time -- more specifically, losing the story when there are long breaks between writing sessions due to lack of time.

To overcome this specific barrier, Mary Robinette suggests breadcrumbing.

Now, I have breadcrumbed before -- that is, leaving a couple of lines at the end of your writing session to prompt you about what happens next in the story. But it never worked for me.

The breadcrumbs I laid where usually enough to help me produce a vague paragraph or two of action or dialogue, but never enough to gain any story momentum.

My problem was poor quality crumbs.

Breadcrumbs and breadcrumbs

Mary Robinette's breadcrumb recipe, and one I've now adopted, is this: by all means breadcrumb what's going to happen next, but more importantly, breadcrumb your protagonist's goal in the current scene.

What does your protagonist want? And how are they trying to achieve it?

She also suggests when you next sit down to write that you very briefly re-read and perform minor edits on what you wrote last session. This will give a feel for tone, pace and progress of the scene.

But don't tarry too long in the reading/editing headspace -- major re-reads and edits come later. Dive back into the story.

I tell you, that quality of breadcrumb has made all the difference for me.

I can drop staight back into my protagonist's head and get the story moving quickly. And I can do that usually in just a few minutes.

30-minutes writing blocks is about all I can manage nowadays -- sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can do two back-to-back.

I now take a few minutes at the end of a session to mark where I started the writing that day, breadcrumb the next couple of beats/actions in the current scene, write what my protagonist (and other key characters in the scene) is striving for.

Most of the heavy cognitive lifting at the start of my next sessions is already done.

In 30 minutes, now, I can usually squeeze out about 300-500 words. This is close to what I was doing back in my heyday.

(Yeah, I'm never going to be one of those authors who can churn books out by the month.)

And I'm fairly happy with that output.

For the moment, at least, breadcrumbing is my new jam.

All images from pixabay.com.